Olivia Colman has said she has always ‘felt sort of nonbinary’ as the actress opened up about her identity in a new interview.
Olivia, 52, who is best known for her roles in The Crown, The Favourite and Heartstopper and has been married to her husband Ed Sinclair for 25 years, said she has never felt comfortable with rigid gender roles, including in her own marriage.
The actress, who is promoting her new role in queer film Jimpa, explained: ‘Throughout my whole life, I’ve had arguments with people where I’ve always sort of felt nonbinary.
‘I’ve never felt massive feminine in my being female. I’ve always described myself to my husband as a gay man.
‘And he goes, “Yeah I get that.” And so I do feel at home and at ease.’
She added to Them: ‘I don’t really spend a whole lot of time with people who are very staunchly heterosexual… The men I know and love are very in touch with all sides of themselves.
Olivia Colman has said she has always ‘felt sort of nonbinary’ as the actress opened up about her identity in a new interview
Olivia Colman has been married to screenwriter and film producer Ed Sinclair since 2001
‘I think with my husband and I, we take turns to be the “strong one”, or the one who needs a little bit of gentleness. I believe everyone has all of it in them. I’ve always felt like that.
‘I’m not alone in saying, “I don’t feel like it’s binary.” And I loved that. I came away from making this film with, yeah, I knew I wasn’t alone.
Nonbinary is a term used to describe a person’s gender identity that falls outside the traditional male and female binary.
Olivia and Ed married in 2001, and share three children – Finn, 20, Hall, 18, and a ten-year-old daughter, after falling in love in the nineties while rehearsing for a Cambridge Footlights production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Table Manners. At the time, Olivia was studying teaching at Homerton College, Cambridge.
Ed was an actor before he became a screenwriter and film producer. He wrote the 2021 Sky drama series Landscapers starring Olivia and David Thewlis, and recently produced The Roses starring Olivia and Benedict Cumberbatch as a husband and wife at war.
Recalling the first time she saw him, Olivia added: ‘I’d gone to two of the rehearsals and there was no one particularly fanciable there. Then I walked in and I saw his left-hand profile.
‘At the time he was smoking a ciggie, his feet were crossed, and he’s got this lovely bump in his nose and I saw his side profile and just went, “Oh my God, I’m going to marry him.”
‘I had proper thunderbolts: that’s him, that’s him! Poor thing, he didn’t know.’
In a typically self-deprecating manner, Olivia claimed that while she vividly remembers the first time she met Ed, the feeling wasn’t mutual. ‘He genuinely can’t remember it,’ she said.
She previously told the Daily Mail in 2013: ‘My husband and I were very lucky. We met when we had nothing and we loved each other then. So we were all right.
‘We were 20 and he was also an actor. If you meet at that age then you’re fine.’
Olivia’s comments come as she stars in new queer film Jimpa, playing a mother who takes her nonbinary child to visit their gay father abroad
Last year Olivia revealed the surprising secret behind her long-lasting marriage, admitting that they don’t argue.
‘It’s our 25th wedding anniversary next year. We’ve been together 31 years,’ Olivia told the Good Hang podcast.
Asked why she thinks they’ve lasted so long, she replied, ‘We’re not big fighters, which apparently isn’t very healthy.
‘We have learned over the years – but really late on actually – to sometimes [think], if that was annoying, just wait.
‘And it doesn’t work for everyone, I know that, but I think it’s much better to wait until the calmer moments to go, “Can we talk about that moment? I did find that a little weird and is that OK that I’m saying this and yes I was a bit cross that day…”‘
The mother-of-three, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 2019, stars alongside John Lithgow in the new movie
The actress, who won the Best Actress Oscar in 2019 for her role in The Favourite opposite Emma Stone, added she’s still physically attracted to Ed all these years later.
‘He’s my best friend and I fancy him, which is quite nice,’ she said.
The couple married in 2001 after dating for seven years. She has previously said he plays a very supporting role at home.
‘He’s always there when I’m feeling like I did a bad job or something, so we’re there to pick each other up,’ she has said.
Joking about his career switch from actor to screenwriter, she added, ‘We worked out very early on that it’s much better if he’s a writer, I’m an actor and we don’t talk about it. It’s much easier not to talk about the work.’
Olivia’s comments come as she stars in new queer film Jimpa which tells the story of Hannah (Colman), mother to nonbinary child Frances (Aud Mason-Hyde), as they travel to Amsterdam to visit Frances’s grandpa Jim (John Lithgow).
Olivia’s comments come as she stars in new queer film Jimpa which tells the story of Hannah (pictured), mother to nonbinary child Frances
When Frances decides they want to stay in Amsterdam to live with their grandfather, Hannah is forced to re-evaluate her parenting and her relationship with her child.
The film is directed by and based on Sophie Hyde’s real-life experience, with John’s character based on her own ‘gay activist’ father, and stars her own trans non-binary child Aud Mason-Hyde as Frances.
Olivia previously spoke to Vanity Fair about playing a character that was based on the film’s director.
She said: ‘I haven’t had that before. [Laughs] I felt quite nervous at the beginning, but very soon, Sophie just made you feel like you can’t go wrong. It’s your interpretation. It’s you doing it. And she just let me crack on with it, really.’
Olivia has previously won praise for her roles in LGBTQ+ fare, winning the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in period drama The Favourite, where she played Queen Anne, who engages in a same-sex affair with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough.
She also starred as Sarah Nelson, the mother of bisexual teenager Nick in the Netflix series Heartstopper, and was lauded by fans for a heartwarming scene where her son came out to her.
